Why voter ID laws are like a poll tax

When is a voter restriction law like a poll tax? This is the question posed by a wave of laws passed in 11 states that require voters to show state-issued photo IDs.

Attorney General Eric Holder has argued that such laws are not aimed at preventing voter fraud, as supporters claim, but to make it more difficult for minorities to exercise their right to vote. The new Texas photo ID law is like the poll taxes, Holder charges, used to disfranchise generations of African-American and Mexican-American citizens.

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry denies this. He claims that using “poll tax” language is “designed to inflame passions and incite racial tension.” Perry is now demanding an apology from President Barack Obama for “Holder’s imprudent remarks.”

But no apology needs to be issued. For these laws function very much like a poll tax.

Poll taxes belong to an ugly chapter in U.S. race relations. They were part of the Southern states’ Jim Crow system, which prevailed from the late 19th century into the 1960s, and robbed blacks and other minorities of their political and civil rights.

The new voter ID laws are, of course, not exactly the same as the old poll taxes. History provides few examples of exact replicas. But the new laws and the historic poll tax do share three significant points:

First, a voter restriction is like a poll tax when its authors use voting fraud as a pretext for legislation that has little to do with voting fraud.

Second, it is like a poll tax when it creates only a small nuisance to some voters, but for other groups it erects serious barriers to the ballot.

Third, it is like a poll tax when it has crude partisan advantage as its most immediate aim.

The Voting Fraud Pretext

Southern states in the 1890s enacted literacy tests, poll taxes and other laws to regulate voting. Politicians who wrote these laws made no secret of their belief in white supremacy. And most Southerners understood that these laws were designed to keep African-Americans and other targeted groups from voting.

But there was a problem: the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. Adopted in 1870, the amendment prohibits any state from depriving citizens of their right to vote based on race. This meant that the poll tax laws could say nothing about race, and the Southern political leaders could not write their real intent into the law. They needed a pretext.

What they came up with was voter fraud. There was plenty of irony in this — because these same politicians who supported the poll tax had raised election-rigging to a high art. Many had been involved in vote-buying schemes, and fixing elections by “counting out” the other side.

The poll tax would do little to prevent such fraudulent voting tactics. But, just as its supporters intended, it put another barrier between minority and poor voters and the ballot box.

The supporters of today’s new voter ID laws deny that they have any racial motive. These laws, however, are anything but racially neutral. The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School estimates that in Texas alone, for example, the new photo ID requirements could prevent hundreds of thousands of eligible voters from casting a ballot — including a disproportionate number of African-American and Mexican-American citizens.

How to justify such racially imbalanced laws? This is a problem. We still have the 15th Amendment, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally put some teeth in that amendment. The authors of these ID laws need a pretext. So they reached for the old standby of voter fraud.

In reality, cases of voter impersonation, the only type of fraud that a photo ID might prevent, are extraordinarily rare. And picture IDs do nothing to address the real problems with absentee ballots, trimming voting lists and other tactics that “count out” the opposition. What they do, however, is erect new barriers between minority and poor voters and the ballot box.